Joined: 01 May 2007Posts: 1080Location: in that cool mountain air, on an appalachian trail

Posted: Wed May 08, 2013 10:33 pm Post subject:

Snorri wrote:

Michael wrote:

Samsally wrote:

I always wondered about the mastectomy thing. It seems like a pretty big surgery for a time period that was not well known for people surviving surgeries. I guess it just adds to their badassery, myth or not.

I don't really want to suggest this was a pain-free, easy, or risk-free surgery back then, but people have been known to do crazy things (like relieving pressure on the skull) for ages before we'd think it safe.
I'm agreeing with you 100% that you can't just assume they did this routinely and everyone was fine but... you can't really assume they could not do this either

Mastectomies are a far bigger surgery though.

yeah, and trepanning is supposed to get you really high while a mastectomy is only going to fuck with your balance for a bit._________________FormerlyGreen_Finn

I love how, when "historical' works are discussed, ideas like embellishment, exaggeration, and plain old 'making shit up for the sake of better storytelling', seem to barely get lip service.

Also, I only cursorily follow American comics (Yay Lobo is in a game) so I looked up Starfire on Google image to see how bad it was. Wow. Considering My main association with DC is watching Teen Titans Go! with my kids, I was shocked. This caught my eye though and made me sorta laugh and cry at the same time:

So, from the blog I read, it's not that she's just become a walking blow-up doll for DC, but she's now also basically an emotionless sex machine. It's kinda creepy and disturbing to me that you can have a character portrayed in two such absurdly different ways. Are they saying that somehow she went from innocent and curious teen to a whatever-the fuck-ever prepubescent sex fantasy basically because she got a few years older? I'm lost here._________________...if a single leaf holds the eye, it will be as if the remaining leaves were not there.http://about.me/omardrake

Re Starfire and sex--basically she started as a very sexy, but very much in love with life and in touch with her emotions and a profoundly caring person (circa 1980), and in fact she and Dick Grayson in bed was one of the first mainstream depictions of a sexual relationship (just in bed together, not shown pornographically).

They are ruled by their emotions and were renowned as excellent warriors. ... The Tamaraneans used scientific skills to make Tamaran a tropical paradise where man and nature stood side by side.

For the animated series a few years ago, Starfire kept her emotional intensity, but without sexual elements, and with a much more modest costume--but, critically, she loved her friends deeply and that was still part of the whole center of the character.

Alas, the New 52 version of Starfire is... well, apparently there's slightly more complexity to her now than when she was first re-invented, but as Wikipedia points out:

Quote:

...there have been significant changes in the history and culture of the Tamaranean people. ... A major change is that, Tamaraneans shown said to only view other races as sensory experiences, to the point they forget what they look like if not around the person. Though it's shown that once identified by name, Starfire can remember them. It's also said, they do not to believe emotions are a part of the sexual experience, recreational or reproduction wise.

...70 percent of the survey's 5,336 respondents were already fans, with only 5 percent completely new to buying comics, and 93% were male. What's more, only an estimated 2 percent were younger than 18 years old...

Things are being second guessed left and right, a case of too many chiefs, not enough Indians now. Whether it will work? Who am I to say. They want it to be like Hollywood, and it’s becoming like Hollywood, in producing comics, and what you have is a corporate room deciding where things are going to go. And part of the reason for me leaving Superman is that I had certain ideas I wanted to do unfortunately, stuff that they okay one day, they would change their mind the next day, and it was becoming waytoo difficult...

And there are a lot of people leaving DC for similar reasons--some more explosively than others, but with a very similar refrain, like a drumbeat, of constant editorial changes, a very very top-down approach to the way the comics are done, apparently with a lot of rationale based on marketing and aimed at producing fodder for future movies.

With Gail now reinstated on the title, I have to ask -- how much was fan outcry and fan support part of that creative editorial decision?

Harras: What we had was Ray [Fawkes] coming on for two months to help out, schedule-wise. We're very happy Gail is back; she's on the book moving forward, so to me, that was a moment in time where we were just looking for Gail's next plot to come in and we're moving forward.

THIS WAS NOT TRUE. The spin is ... bizarre. Everyone knew, because Gail gave them, the details of her abrupt firing and rehiring.

(You may also note in one of those articles the ending of the Hellblazer series from Vertigo and the beginning of the new DC Universe Constantine series (in the New 52 he's a member of Justice League Dark), and I'll just let you all Google all of that, but I think the common denominator, again, is Trying To Market Things To A Rather Narrow Target Audience...)

When CBR proposed the idea of a regular column with DC's executive staff, our stated intent was for the feature to be a place to connect the decision makers at the publisher with the wider comics community. Aside from product and story information, discussing the industry news and debates of the day was something we always planned to focus on both in the regular interviews with Harras and Chase and the monthly fan Q&A. However, the DC team has made it clear to CBR that discussing some of the more controversial debates surrounding the company and the comics community is not something they feel comfortable doing in this format, and ultimately they decided to no longer participate in this feature. ... After ensuing discussions on the matter, CBR regrets that DC has decided not to continue what we consider a valuable discussion for readers, retailers and creators. We will however continue to cover the company's comics, editorial moves and broader impact on comics to the best of our ability – including future interviews with DC executives and editorial staff as they are willing and available.

Oh, and the brouhaha over Orson Scott Card, which had its own petition. The artist for the story finally decided he didn't want to be involved with the project. But making Card the first named writer for the first issue of this otherwise excellent, classic-style, non-continuity, red-briefs-and-all series (done-in-one stories instead of endless trade-writing? Yes please!) seemed an odd choice in the first place--oh, but the Ender's Game movie is coming out soon, isn't it? Maybe that was the reason?

And, oh, yes, anonymous DC creators (I'm guessing Rich Johnston genuinely knows who they were) with their own suggestions for how DC could be improved, including "Editorial has a right to dictate how their lines should progress, but not at the last minute and while changing other parts. Stop trying to please all of the people all of the time and just try to tell a solid story," "It is okay for someone other than Dan Didio to have an idea ... why does every idea have to get bottle necked through one man?" and "Stop deciding what happens in a book with the flip of a coin."

And... yes, really... this is just a chunk of the iceberg. All over the last year and a half since the New 52 started.

...Joshua Fialkov's resignation from his Green Lantern titles was due in large part to an editorial edict to kill off John Stewart.

Stewart is one of DC's most recognizable African-American characters... is also arguably the character most associated with the Green Lantern franchise among the non-comics reading public, having been the face of the Corps for the popular Justice League cartoons. He's so associated with the franchise, in fact, that when Ryan Reynolds was announced as the lead in Warner Bros. live action film, many people wondered why a white actor had been cast as a character who they thought of as black.

DC just sort of keeps shooting themselves in the foot these days. The new writer, fortunately, has been given no such mandate by DC, so John Stewart seems safe for now.

I never realized how awesome Starfire is in the old cartoons. Good god they really screwed her over didn't they?

Well they took her from a woman who's very passionate and connects deeply with other people and turned her into a sex fiend who can't really connect with anybody around her, so yeah. Basically they took all the maturity out of it and handled it instead with an adolescent mindset, and it wrecked her character for no good reason.
Yeah, I'm a little miffed. This is what you call "backsliding" and it couldn't be more blatant.

*edit* Also, thanks for all those references Chast. They do pretty much confirm what I've suspected as a total outsider (though I would take anything Liefeld bitches about with a huge block of salt, the rest of it is fairly consistent).

I'm the worst candidate for liking comics ever. I'm already predisposed against them because I greatly dislike the wordy and overexplanatory nature that the sequential art medium imposes on any work that isn't expressly trying to avoid the issue.

On top of that, the stagnation of the industry is self-reinforcing and has caused nearly all comics to be a wasteland of shitty overused tropes, adolescent male power fantasy (and all its associated gazes), and stiflingly inbred continuity porn which isolates comics to a rapidly diminishing circle of obsessed insiders.

It works for some people, sure, but by now the industry is so dysfunctional that it's driving off even its core of insiders, bit by bit. The sales charts for DC prior to their reboot were utterly pathetic and gave an indication of total collapse.

But honestly what now really seals the deal for me is that they have looked at their narrow demographics and decided to sell up exploitative elements to them. Straight-up pornographizing starfire into a ready-made nymphomaniac and piece of unclad meat for the pages is pretty much just a product of that. It emphasizes the sort of reader they are trying to keep.

Which, in and of itself, emphasizes what sort of reader should not want to keep them.

I really like comics as a medium (to the point of plotting a graphic novel and actually having started it). I don't care for the 'voice over' thing a lot of them do, especially since I feel like the story -should- be progressed primarily with the images. Every time I think "man I should read more comics so I can get better at page layouts" I remember all the things talked about in this thread and get mad.

I'm working on turning "mad" into "determined"._________________Samsally the GrayAce

Joined: 01 May 2007Posts: 1080Location: in that cool mountain air, on an appalachian trail

Posted: Thu May 09, 2013 11:37 pm Post subject:

I never got into comics, either as a kid it seems like something I would have really enjoyed but there wasn't any money in those days for stuff like that. Fast forward to a few years later and as I seldom have my face out of a book, I just couldn't imagine that a comic book could even come close to the experience that I get from a great novel. I have started reading them a little, like when I know that I'll be spending 7-10 days in the hospital then I'll download lots of music, videos, and a few comics (just the big things that I wouldn't need much back story for: civil war, secret invasion, that big green lantern thing, planet- and world war- hulk, death of superman, death of batman, etc.)

I found this awesome chick on youtube that actually has kinda made me want to look into reading comics. I found her through one of her posts on game of thrones, so it's not exclusively comics. She has videos address most of the stuff brought up in this thread.